Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Why The American Democratic Party is Driving Me Nuts

The only big things I care about in domestic politics are:1. Affordable Healthcare/Free Healthcare2. Living Wage

And I always considered these things to be pretty "liberal" issues. Still I just don't hear a lot of talk about it, I don't see much political action. In the democratic party's effort to try and attract more conservative voters, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Couldn't they cede a less important issue? And aren't all issues less important than healthcare? Why not make welfare stricter, disqualify some of those who don't deserve it in a hard audit, and then use that money to say, reduce the cost of healthcare across the board about about 5-10%?All I see is the whining. The Democrats don't seem to put much in the way of constructive action forward, they just seem to play moral police every time anyone republican does something conservative(which, by the way, should not shock them nearly as much as it does.) All they do is react with a continuous level of "outrage" that I'm really starting to doubt is much more than theatrics.(Nancy Pelosi?)They've had every possible chance so far to capitalize on the negative publicity surrounding the presidency and the majority whip scandals. What do they do? Sure as hell not anything very effective. On a more grassroots level, Adbusters Magazine and the like are just that much more a manifestation of how the left in the U. S. is just wasting it's time and vital energy. So much young energy at their command, and the magazine reccomends not, say, building affordable housing, starting a farmer's market, or an employment agency for homeless people, but rather, that their readers black out logos on all surfaces in their daily life. They seem to have lost all the left's good will toward humanity, and replaced it with scorn and hostility for a world which voted Republican. They enjoy being the "morally superior" underdog, instead of helping people, they just complain about what has been done to them.In short, I think that they've just gotten too comfortable with the role of minority and made themselves unfit for being a majority because of it. They've become too comfortable being convinced the world is going to hell, and they've started to enjoy this decline because it gives them something new to whine about or react to. I'm really starting to think that a total corporate dystopia would make the average Adbusters reader or Michael Moore fan happiest, because they would be able to say "I told you so" and then feel like a revolutionary all the more.

And then theres that problem where criticism from the inside of the left provokes total outrage.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

I read in the school (MTSU) newspaper this week that there was going to be a large sale of records and sheet music on campus from the MTSU library of pop music. Apparently these were duplicates from within the catalog, which the school claims contains almost every pop music recording ever. The paper said "fleamarket prices" which to me means about $1-3 per LP. I found a lot of records I might have bought at that price, except they were about $25 a piece. What a dissappointment. I did, however, get a very early Sway and King Tech LP(Flynamic Force) with had the added bonus of having the All City Crew promoters business card from 1988 in it! Art on the sleeve looks like hand drawn anime-ish versions of sway and king tech playing.But on the way out, I picked up a couple issues of the Journal of Pop Music Studies or some such nonsense. They're issued yearly and I got three years.What a load of crap Pop Music studies is. Did somebody make a living while writing this garbage? Almost without exception, the articles read like a cross between a Rolling Stone review and an amazon.com blurb... Talk about pointlessly self-absorbed rambling! Far and away the most entertaining of them all was an article called : Techno Music and Sonic Communities: When Modern Markets and Postmodern Pleasures Collide. So far from my reading it seems to revolve around the Chemical Brothers being mentioned on Beverly Hills 90210, and its written in a some sort of a self-absorbed combination of "9th grader impersonating Kerouac" and "19 year old pitchfork reader."It's agonizing, but I have to keep reading, just because of my amazement that trash like this "academic journal" or this field of "pop music studies" even exists. Talk about a pointless pursuit.Oh and I'm anxiously awaiting both my move and my surgery in two weeks, I may one day be able to listen to my stereo-rama records in stereo!

Monday, February 06, 2006

So, its the day before Christmas Eve, and my apartment building is on fire while I stand outside in aqua socks and shorts in December. The next day, I call Comcast about my internet access, which has been running slow, and constantly disconnecting.They offer to send somebody out, but I don't wanna make some poor dude work on Christmas Eve...nor do I want to deal with the quality of work I would recieve from some inept contractor on Christmas Eve.Now, its February 6th. 6 Technicians and 5 service visits later, my internet is still unbearably slow, I can't play online games, I can't watch a video, nothing!

Tech 2: "I've never heard of 'reverse noise', I think he must have made that up. You must have been moved on a splitter fed to your building, I'll move you down to the two way splitter.

Tech 3: Your signal is much too high, it needs stepped down.

Tech 4: You have problems because of the cable traps on your line, let me remove them.

note that this tech also told me his name was uhhh John and his number was 169, he also sat down at my computer on a sunday morning and looked at government auctions for impounded cars for like 20 minutes.)

Call Center: There is an area wide problem with two towns(the one I'm moving from and the one I'm moving to) It should be resolved.

Call Center rep 2: I haven't heard anything about an area outage, I will upgrade you to the 8mbit internet access as a gift. (that was no gift, my bill was $10 higher the next month)

So now its been a month that I've tolerated this complete ineptitude, confusing and misleading lines about what the problem is, lack of professionalism, and general USELESSNESS.

The real problem? They're pretty much the only broadband option in my area!I hate to give people like this a dime, though. I also hate to feel trapped, the only other real options are satellite and DSL(both of which are almost as miserably useless as this cable company!)They should fear the day I fidn more options!